Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money by James Buchan

Frozen Desire is my personal favorite of the books covered in Spring 1998's Soul and Money section. If we have money or don't have money, we reflect and act out our desires through it. As Doestoyevsky wrote in Crime and Punishment, we coin our liberty, our sense of freedom, by having more or less; by thinking about how we and others should have more or less. Buchan is the only nonfiction writer willing to trek into this dangerous world, the jungle strangeness and shadowy elusiveness of money and desire. Hard/cold cash and the joys of making hay, megabucks and peanuts, gold-digging seductions and filthy-lucre white collars, the chicken feed and the mother's milk of politics. His breadth is huge, from Homer to Rembrandt to liability/asset management to John Law. And quixotic. A longtime reporter for the Financial Times, his Middle East beat gives him remarkable insights about money and desire. An accomplished writer with a roller-coaster style that loops you back to read the best paragraphs two or three times.